01604: Geeky Time at Chinatown

We may tuck in a lot earlier today - I think our first two days of activity sufficiently drained us to merit that. Plus this morning we woke up a lot earlier than expected and so already Tobie has retired for bed after a rather generous lamb dinner courtesy of my sister. It's a good thing that I included Monday in my original vacation leave request. I could force myself to go to work straight away after our return flight but I strongly expect this vacation has sufficiently thrown my sleeping pattern out of whack to make returning to my "normal" time a not-so-simple adventure in its own right.

Today's only real activity was heading out to Chinatown. The rest of the day we spent here at my sister's place as we helped settle in the new Labrador Retriever that she's fostering for a week or so.

Chinatown was fun as always. Although I think Tobie and I have pretty much saturated what there is to find and purchase at The Tintin Shop until they come up with seriously new merchandise that doesn't totally break our wallets.

So instead we spent more time at China Square Central, which is a mall full of hobby toy stores sort of like Greenhills. While not all toys are necessarily cheaper, we do end up finding some rather rare items that makes the trips worthwhile. And it's always tricky to properly time our visits to coincide when the stores are actually open and so we've been varying our visiting times for each of our past trips.
This time around we got pretty lucky given most of the stores were actually open all at the same time.\

I wasn't expecting to buy anything on this trip but Tobie was the real genius in terms of finding things. We found some interesting pasalubongs for gifting purposes and a few choice items that really surprised me. The gem of today's hunt was a mint in box set of the Micro Machines Collector's Edition Star Trek Television Series I miniatures. They're in pristine condition and all with the same silvery pewter paint that makes them look like statuettes of a sort. This may be one of the few items in my collection that I may never remove from the box just for the sheer value of the set. Thank you so much for finding this set, Tobie!

We also found the Japan-exclusive Takara Transformers Generations Fall of Cybertron Skywarp, who remains to be one of my favorite Seekers. He's quite the cute little space-capable snub fighter!

All in all, I think we're more than achieved our shopping goals for this trip. Plus I don't think it would be very smart to spend any more, haha! We have one more full day in Singapore before it comes time to really pack our things and prepare for the journey back home to Manila.

I have no idea what we're going to do tomorrow. I'm sure we'll think of something worthwhile.